writing

"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"The story is always better than your ability to write it."

"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply."

"Like madness is the glory of this life."

"You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."("The Castle")"

"A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it."

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

"In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it."

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."

"I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]"

"Chase your dreams until you catch them...and then dream, catch, and dream again!"

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"

"I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them."

"A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been."

"it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply."